


buried alive

by twoif



Category: Black Panther (2018)
Genre: Bullshit About Vibranium, Canon - Movie, Gen, Killmonger is Implied, Wakanda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-23
Updated: 2018-02-23
Packaged: 2019-03-22 22:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13773690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twoif/pseuds/twoif
Summary: T'Challa, king of the living, king of the dead, king of the in-between.The body is heavy. T'Challa's own trembles. He may not be able to support much more. He has been through so much already.Bast be with me, he curses.I have already borne so much today.But still, he carries Killmonger once more.





	buried alive

After he can no longer hear Killmonger's breathing, T'Challa hefts the body over his shoulder and carries it to the nearest cliff that overlooks water. In his sore, exhausted state, it is not an easy feat. His entire body throbs dully, like the heart of a dying rhino. Vibranium absorbs kinetic energy, but even the best vibranium suit can't counteract the fact that he's been thrown around, ragdoll-like, all day. 

Sea burials, for obvious reasons, are not part of Wakandan tradition. Even if they were, T'Challa imagines they wouldn't be held by one tired man slumping by the side of the body, with no one else to help or grieve. T'Challa considers his options. Holding it in his arms, releasing it like a leaden statue off the cliff. Shoving it off. 

Falling off with it. 

With him. 

"N'Jadaka," he begins, and stops. It does not feel right. "Erik," he tries again.

Even in death, Killmonger cannot stay quiet, cannot let T'Challa carry out whatever funeral rites he can remember, cannot let T'Challa give him kindness. _Call me by my name_ , the body says mockingly. _The one you feel in your heart._

"Killmonger." His voice is barely a cracked whisper.

 _Your people let me die once,_ he hears rising up from the abyss. _You want to abandon me again, like this?_

"Nonsense," T'Challa breathes, into nothingness. "You asked for this yourself."

He takes the golden necklace off the body, stalling. The leopard suit retracts, insect-like, into the metal, leaving behind just the body, with all its natural textures: the puckered wound, the cicatrices across the chest and arms, the smooth skin of the face. After a moment, T'Challa asks his own suit to retract, to match. He folds the arms over the chest Wakandan-style, hesitates. Brushes dirt and sweat off of the forehead. In the limbo between life and death, Killmonger looks carefree and at peace, like one of W'Kabi's nephews, ready to run across the grass to greet someone coming home. 

And still, even with the leopard suit stripped off, he feels the pull. A vibration under his fingers as he passes them over the length of Killmonger's face, trying to call down his ancestors. It is thick and faint at the same time, the sound of a bubble of blood popping. He tastes the Heart-Shaped Herb under his tongue.

He rips off one of the claws from the golden necklace and shoves it into the swollen edge of the knife wound. The vibranium spreads across the chest, almost playfully curling into the mounds of the scars. T'Challa thinks he sees it pulsing faintly, but suspects that is just his imagination. With inhuman deftness, the vibranium knits the lips of the wound closed, oxidizes the blood around it a dark black. He can no longer hear Killmonger's breathing, and he is too afraid to check. 

_I found my daddy with panther claws in his body_ , Killmonger had said. 

_You don't need to live your father's mistakes_ , Nakia had said.

The body is heavy. T'Challa's own trembles. He may not be able to support much more. He has been through so much already. _Bast be with me_ , he curses. _I have already borne so much today._

But still, he carries Killmonger once more. 

 

 

 

To a Wakandan, vibranium is more than a metal or a resource. It is more than a battery to power a hoverbike, or a thread to turn a blanket into a shield, or the stuff from which kimoyo beads are shaped. Vibranium is in the water, in the trees, in the food, in the animals from which Wakanda makes food. Kimoyo means "of the spirit," because the beads make comprehensible what is already the truth, that vibranium is everywhere. A Wakandan who is born and lives and dies in Wakanda is made up of as much vibranium as soul. A Wakandan knows that blood is thicker than water, and vibranium is thicker than both. Vibranium is the water that flows in and between and around two people who have made a connection. Vibranium brings together Wakanda.

Natural vibranium cannot be influenced by magnetic fields, and does not distort any that are exercised upon it. That is why a weapon made of vibranium can pass through a metal detector unnoticed. But vibranium generates its own force, in the presence of its own kind. If you bring two pieces of vibranium together, they resonate on a frequency only vibranium shares. The more vibranium in one place, the larger the resonance. This was what Shuri had solved when it came to the mag-lev trains in the mines: how do you transport large loads of vibranium in a mountain full of vibranium? This is how Klaue was able to verify vibranium when he handled it. 

And this is how Killmonger knew he was in the presence of vibranium when he was at the British Museum. Resonance is why war dogs get vibranium tattoos. It is why those tattoos are called "keys." They open the door to home, to Wakanda. If you lost Wakanda, if you ate too much alien food, drank too much alien water, breathed too much alien air, you could still come home. You were never too alien for Wakanda. As long as you had a key, you would feel it. It wouldn't matter how lost you were, how many cloaking devices covered the Golden City, how far you had been gone. 

You could always find your way home.

 

 

 

"This is not a hospital," M'Baku grumbles as he surveys the body. He pokes at one of the arms with the tip of his staff. Killmonger, of course, does not respond. M'Baku sniffs. "Or a trash heap, for that matter. Take him back to your city monkeys and their science. We cannot help him here."

"What you did for me when I was in the coma, keeping me asleep—could you do that for him?"

M'Baku bares his teeth. "The Great Gorilla can do a lot of things. But for him? No."

"When Lakshmana was mortally wounded fighting Rvana's demon army, Hanuman carried a mountain—" 

M'Baku waves him off, making a derisive sound deep in his throat. "Lakshmana was Lord Rama's brother. It is not the same." 

"We are all someone's brother, M'Baku," T'challa says with a hint of a smile. 

"Yet it did not stop your father from killing his," M'Baku says grumpily, but gestures at his attendants to put the body on a raft and drag it away.

M'Baku's throne room is open to the mountain air. At this altitude, the breeze is always bracing, which is probably why even in the summer Jabari royalty can be found donning animal pelts and outrageously lined boots. Having dragged Killmonger's body all the way here by himself, T'Challa appreciates the cold, which dries the sweat from his forehead, and the hum of the white birch logs as they sway and rub against each other, which soothes the aches of his body. It's been a few days since the great mound battle, and Shuri would tell him that any injuries he still feels are his imagination. But if T'Challa has learned anything recently, it's that the psychological wounds are the ones that last the longest and hurt the most. 

"You look not so good, brother," M'Baku says, giving the last word more vowels than T'Challa thought possible. "Maybe I should put you back in the snow too."

T'Challa smiles, raising a finger to his lips. "If doing so meant I could escape the council's nagging for one day..." 

M'Baku snickers. They _are_ brothers, of a sort. The Jabari left the circle of the Five Tribes at the beginning of time, but the clan is less isolated than everyone likes to pretend. M'Baku, in particular, is a relative closer to T'Challa than most—something on his mother Ramonda's side, a second cousin somewhere who went to the Jabari after she killed her husband for cheating on her and later married into the Jabari royal line. T'Challa had never gone to the mountains as a child, but the Jabari routinely came into the city a few times a year, mostly to trade furs with the Merchant Tribe or argue with the council and the king. As a young man, T'Challa had glimpsed M'Baku once or twice when M'Baku had come with his father into the city, but they had not exchanged pleasantries or gone out drinking together, as he and W'Kabi had. 

Now, T'Challa considers the benefits of having one of the Jabari as a member of the Taifa Ngao. Perhaps the day-to-day consultation would be too taxing for someone who would have to come in from the mountains every time, but there were the regularly planned meetings, the holidays—

M'Baku's voice cuts into his musing. "How long am I supposed to keep this dead rat you dragged in?"

"I don't know." When he sees M'Baku's raised eyebrow, he spreads out his hands, trying to look placating. "I don't. Until he wakes up, if you can. As long as you are willing to, is perhaps the better answer."

"Maybe if we wait long enough, his seed will turn into ice and withdraw back into his body," M'Baku suggests.

T'Challa pauses, surveying M'Baku, who is pretending to examine his nails. "Does that really happen?"

"No, you _mumu_ ," M'Baku sneers. "It is something Jabari mothers tell their sons to keep them from playing in the snow too long. But I will tell you this: if he dies, I will not be held responsible."

T'Challa grins this time, widely, as he turns to go. "I appreciate what you are doing for me, M'Baku," he calls out over his shoulder.

"In fact, if he dies, I will drag his body back to the city and tell your mother you brought him here!" M'Baku hollers after him, and that's enough to get T'Challa to throw up a middle finger at him, Shuri style.

 

 

 

Wakanda was blessed not just once, but twice: first with the Gift, and then with the gift of the Heart-Shaped Herb. It is said that all blessings come from Bast, but the herb was a personal gift from her. It is said that in his dream Bast allowed Bashenga to put his hand in her mouth, and when he awoke he was in a patch of purple flowers, and in his hand he held a seed, the first seed to be harvested. 

Bast is a protector god, who guards her believers from evil spirits and diseases, who is fierce in her love of her children, who delights in music and art and pleasure that makes your heart sing. But Bast is also an all-consuming god, one who demands devotion, whose loyalty is singular and possessive and sometimes difficult. It is said that when Bast led the first Black Panther to the Heart-Shaped Herb, she made him promise to stay here, in what would become Wakanda, where she could always find him _, the first of my name_. It is said that when Bast showed the first Black Panther the Heart-Shaped Herb, she destroyed all others and made it impossible for it to grow anywhere but there, in the heart of Wakanda. 

So perhaps we always make things in our image. 

Perhaps Wakanda, born and made in Bast's image, by those Bast claimed as her own, only echoes her strengths and her mistakes.

 

 

 

 

T'Challa spends several days fighting with Nakia over how best to handle their grand reveal to the UN. T'Challa wants to tell her that it is hard when they fight because he is stupid around her. He has never been his best in front of her: incapable of speech, incapable of action, incapable of grace. 

"She already knows that," Okoye tells him dismissively when he complains. "What did you think? You grew up together." 

But it has been a long time since they've lived together, and love, as Okoye well knows, does not solve all differences. "You are being difficult on purpose," Nakia hisses at him. "I do not deserve this, T'Challa." She does not have to say, _I saved your family for you._ She does not have to say, _I saved your country for you_. She would never say these things, because she is above this pettiness. It is a sign of his own pettiness, that T'Challa can even think them.

Frustrated with himself, he escapes to Shuri's lab, where she is still trying to grow a new patch of the Heart-Shaped Herb. She has plentiful documentation, a seed library, cuttings from the plant kept alive, even the entire genome sequenced many times over. But this has been an experiment Wakanda has been carrying out since its founding, and they've never succeeded in getting the Heart-Shaped Herb to make seed pods outside of the plants in the shaman's cavern. Zuri claimed that he once saw seed-bearing pods deep in the jungle of Wakanda's borders. But Zuri also once claimed he saw one of the Border Tribe's rhinos try to mate with a gorilla, so T'Challa has never known how seriously to take those stories.

"You're crowding me," Shuri complains when he tries to examine one of her most recent attempts. "Don't you have things to do? Like save the world."

He resists rolling his eyes at her, but only barely. "The Heart-Shaped Herb is also my responsibility, little sister. Without it, we can never have another Black Panther." He chews on the inside of his mouth. "Or meet the ones who came before."

"And you are sure it has nothing to do with—" She wiggles her fingers in the direction of the Jabari mountains. When he stares at her stonily, she cracks up, clapping her dirty hands, full of soil, on the back of his nice shirt. "The herb is just a plant, brother. I will bring it back. Where there is a will, we will find a way."

He watches her as she continues to fuss over a cutting. A small clump of withering vines sits unhappily in white egg-shaped trays in front of her. She has a model of the plant suspended in the air in front of her, and she is pulling open, then pulling closed, images of the structure of its leaves. When she zooms down to the molecular level, he can see its cellular walls—line after line of rectangles, almost mechanical in its regularity.

"Sister," he says in a low voice, putting his hands on her shoulders. Of everyone in the world, Shuri is still the person who knows him the best, and under him she goes completely still, instantly alert and humming like a live wire. "The person who we are not talking about, I did not send him there to heal. If I wanted to heal him, I would have brought him to you. I sent him there because he is sleeping."

She nods. He watches her expression in the reflection of the window in front of them both. There is nothing there but trust and curiosity. "What are you waiting for, then?"

"For him to wake up." She jerks back, giving him an unhappy look. "Not his body, but his heart. For him to wake up to who he is, in his heart. Do you understand?"

She shakes her head. "Yes, I understand that my brother is an idiot," she tells him. "Now get out of my lab. Your bad breath is killing me and my plants."

 

 

 

That night, Bast comes to him in a dream. She is a prowling, deep purple shape, first at a distance, then dangerous and heavy on his chest as she presses him down into the ground, her claws extended at his throat. Her shape is not that of a true panther, but sinuous, symbolic, more lines than heft. Her fur is streaked with silver markings. He thinks they are written Wakandan, but they change every time he tries to read them. 

"I do not give the same gift twice," she tells him. Her voice is neither male nor female, but the thundering of a waterfall from far away. "But when I brought you back from the valley of your fathers, you made the choice to save your people. That is good, and I am pleased. So, panther cub, perhaps I will reward you."

His first thought is of the body, half-buried and sleeping in the Jabari mountains. As if created from his thought, a body appears next to him, luminous and white. It has no face, no features but a shape, and it is as blinding as fresh snow under sunlight. 

When she sees it, she opens her mouth and pants, as if laughing. " _Him_? No, that one is nothing to me." In a blink, she shrinks to the size of a house cat, curls up on his chest, and with a sharp claw makes the markings of his necklace across his bare skin. It is a dream, so he does not bleed. The marks glow dark purple on his skin. He is wearing her colors. 

"You wish to make the whole world your kingdom."

Angered, he rears up. She leaps off his chest, lithe and playful. The markings on his chest flare bright purple, like a fresh brand. "No," he says.

"Silence." She opens her mouth in that panting laugh again. "You misunderstand me, son of T'Chaka. You are a good man. I did not mean you wished to rule the world. You want to make the world Wakanda, instead of making Wakanda the world. It is ambitious. But I reward ambition." 

She strides to the body of frost next to him. When she pushes one of her paws through its chest, it crumbles around her. "You desire to save this boy too?" she growls.

"I do," he says, because you do not lie to Bast.

Cat-like, she paws at the crumbled pieces, then swipes them away. They disappear into the dark of his dream, and she turns back to him, suddenly her full panther size again. "Your ancestors helped bring you back to life. But he has rejected those who brought him into this world. Now, who will help him?" 

"I will be his ancestors," T'Challa tells her. "I will find a way." He swallows. "He is Wakanda too. He is our mistakes."

She considers him wordlessly. The Bast that comes to him has no eyes, only voids where the eyes should be. They reflect nothing, see nothing. But still, T'Challa thinks, she knows all. 

When she tears into him, her teeth are white as snow. His chest splits open under her, blood spilling from him in spurts, like flowers. "Sekhmet take that one," she growls, her voice like a heartbeat. "And believe me, she will." _But you_ , her purring tells him as she licks the blood off his closed eyelids, _you are different_.

When T'Challa wakes up, he sees that he has, somehow, wandered into the underground cavern where Zuri used to tend to the Heart-Shaped Herb. He is lying with his arms crossed over his chest in the clay sand pit where every king of Wakanda is born. There is red dust on his face and hands, but he has not been buried in it. On both sides of him are the scorched herb gardens, black as a death sentence. But when he turns his head, he can barely make out the purple glow of a single herb in the ashes. Like a man possessed, he crawls towards it, then touches it with the fingers of his right hand, all curled like a cat ready to attack. The flower unfurls under his touch. 

In the center, pulsating deep purple, is a seed pod. 

Bast purrs in his ear, _after all, you are one of mine_. 

 

 

 

It is an eternal question, that of cats and loyalty. Cats do not love like dogs, but still, they love. They are solitary, but they are territorial. They are always looking for a place to call home. They patrol it, make it their own, they hide and hunt and kill to protect what is theirs. A cat is loyal to a place, to its home. Praise be to Bast, who considers Wakanda her home. 

But a dog is loyal to its people. If you convince a dog to love you, it will love you. You can hit it, beat it, call it names, starve it. And still, it will love you. It is hard to be loyal to a place you never go home to, a place that throws you into the maw of strangers and a strange land. But you could remember a person. You could remember what it feels like to be loved. Vibranium in your mouth, vibranium in your heart. Your heart in your mouth, glowing bright blue. 

_War dogs love Wakanda more than anyone else,_ his father once told him, _because only a war dog truly knows what it is like to be without Wakanda._

The heart will always find a way.

 

 

 

Killmonger wakes up when T'Challa is flying over Oakland. Okoye's piloting is steady. The sky is clear. Their ship is a heat haze hurtling towards Wakanda. T'Challa feels it: a resonance on the left side of his chest, a flutter like a small bird taking flight under his skin. The same place he had sank the knife in Killmonger. Above the heart, bleeding out. 

T'Challa stays very still. Thinks about the river behind the house of Nakia's family, smooth as glass, the smell of fresh grass cut under W'Kabi's scythe, the click of kimoyo beads as Shuri, barely two years old, beats him at an impromptu game of marbles, the slick oil his mother likes to rub into her hands to keep them soft and nimble, the hum of his father's ring on his finger. Vibranium in all of this. The water. The ground. His own body. 

_And you, too_ , he thinks at Killmonger, and feels their bodies tremble.

**Author's Note:**

> \- Thank you as always to gluedol for the beta.  
> \- Title was not actually inspired by Kendrick Lamar's interlude to "Marvin's Room," but it's a happy accident.  
> \- All bullshit about the properties of vibranium, the history of the Heart-Shaped Herb, and war dogs is built out from movie canon, with some cross-referencing to Marvel Wiki articles. I know there is some comics canon about why the Heart-Shaped Herb does what it does (it increases your kinaesthetic senses) which I've internalized but I don't believe is part of movie canon (yet). I'm curious whether we will ever get an explanation of how tied the Heart-Shaped Herb is to the mutations supposedly caused by vibranium in the comics -- but that is neither here nor there.  
> \- I think there are some legitimate questions as to whether the Hanuman or the Bast mentioned in the movie are the "real" Hanuman and Bast, i.e. the Hanuman and Bast that we in the real world would refer to or be familiar with (and, of course, whether the Bast mentioned in the movies is the same Bast that appears in the comics). That said, [the story of Hanuman saving Lakshmana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjeevani_\(plant\)) was too good for me not to include (sanjeevani glows!! in the dark!!!!!) and I liked the way the real history of Bast(et) worship dovetails with the story presented in the film about Wakanda. Sekhmet, incidentally, is a lion-based goddess who became a more violent/blood-thirsty goddess as Bast more and more became a cat deity associated with protection. Again, too good to ignore!


End file.
